Artikel The Detroit News
Artikel The Detroit News
Monday May 25, 2009
Metro Final
By Steve Pardo
Lost, but never forgotten
Europeans honor fallen U.S. troops on Memorial Day
U.S. Army Technical Sgt. Cliffe Wolfe, a Detroiter, fought and died Nov. 14, 1944, in the horrific World War II campaign known as the Battle of Hurtgen Forest. Or at least that’s what’s believed about him today.
His body, never recovered, was lost in the battle site muck and mire amid the 100-foot fir trees that made the campaign a gloomy place to fight even at noon. But Wolfe’s name is one of 1,722 etched on the “Tablets of the Missing” inside the Netherlands American Cemetery. The cemetery, an hour’s drive away from the forest in the village of Margraten, has 8,301 American military personnel buried.
Wolfe’s body may have been lost. But a Dutch man born decades after the soldier went missing promises Wolfe’s name and sacrifice will never be forgotten.
Bart van de Sterren, 43, “Adopted” Wolfe at random last year. The idea of adopting the graves of the American liberators originated in February 1945. The practice is so popular all of the soldiers buried in the cemetery are already adopted. Organizers allowed the names of those missing to be adopted in recent years.
This Memorial Day, van der Sterren will go to the cemetery in Margraten and put flowers at the tablets bearing the infantryman’s name. It’s something this countrymen do as a way to remember the Americans who fought overseas.
“I still consider it to be an honor to remember the fallen U.S. soldiers”, van der Sterren said. “For me it is the least I can do to show my gratitude and respect for what so many young men from far over the ocean did for us more than 60 years ago”.
GIs remembered abroad
There are 24 U.S. military cemeteries on foreign soil. The are the resting places of 124,913 U.S. dead from three wars, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. Tablets of the Missing memorialize more than 94,000 U.S. servicemen and woman with memorials, monuments and markers.
The Battle of the Hurtgen Forest was named for a series of battles fought in a forest between the Germans and Americans during World War II from September 1944 to February 1945. It became the longest battle on German ground in thet war.
The Margraten cemetery is the only one of its kind in the Netherlands. After World War II, families of identified soldiers had the option of getting their remains back to America. The practice stopped in 1951.
Every year, thousands flock to the cemetery for the Memorial Day events. Van der Sterren had gone beyond once-a-year caretaking. He’s researched Wolfe’s past and contacted family members – a practice encouraged by the adoptee organizers. He’s even made an American friend or two in the process.
His research led him to Laura Phillips, a Florida woman and whose cousin was killed in Germany during World War II. Phillips helped van der Sterren with the research, and the two are regularly have been setting out flowers and remembering her cousin, Leslie I. Loveland, for three generations.
“It’s wonderful,” Phillips said. “There are a lot of people out there who may have a family member in their background who have no idea this goes on.”
Combing archives
Phillips and van der Sterren have done additional sleuthing requesting military records, combing archives. Just a few weeks ago, efforts led them to former Metro Detroiter Susan Miller – a 62-year-old high school teacher in Rochester, N.Y.
Miller is also Wolfe’s niece – one of his closest surviving relatives. She has corresponded with van der Sterren and found Phillips a veritable treasure trove of information on her family. That information includes a h history and letters written by Miller’s grandmother to military officers after Wolfe’s disappearance.
The pair talked on the phone for more than an hour recently. Miller said it was like talking to a long-lost relative.
Miller was in het 20s when her grandmother, Wolfe’s mother, died, and she was close to her, she said. For years her grandmother wrote letters to military officers, hoping for something, anything – a bone fragment, perhaps, of her son.
“She had all my grandmother’s letters and knew all the family names,” said Miller, who is retiring from teaching at the end of this year. “She knew my father, Charles, had lived in Detroit and was the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools in the ’70s. It’s such a kindness. It just blows me away.”
Miller said she was amazed at the effort Netherlanders put in for servicemen such as her uncle.
“It’s just a wonderful story. Everyone I’ve been able to tell had just been so taken with it.
“It restores my faith in humanity.”
Lees meer over TSGT Cliffe H. Wolfe
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